The pressure to create new profit sources for network operators is starting to generate some momentum in the network technology and architecture space, but it’s too early to call a trend in part because there are still a lot of profit options being pursued. Not only that, even those who might see the same profit…
I’ve been watching to see how long it would take for network vendors to begin to recognize the need for something more than pushing boxes, and we have indications that for some at least the time may be here. Don’t expect sudden logic from these guys; there’s an internal culture to fight whose inertia has…
Well, Apple has finally quashed (most of) the rumors and announced its “new iPad”. It has the quad-core A5X processor, Retina display with photorealistic resolution, and is much faster on cellular wireless—21Mbps HSPA+, DC-HSDPA at 42Mbps, and LTE at 73Mbps. However, the notion of a fully software-define radio capable of supporting anyone’s service isn’t in…
Networking is the business of traffic and capacity, supply and demand, and we have some news in both of these spaces. I’d love to say that we had news suggesting that the balancing of these two factors—critical for any market—was being achieved. I can’t. Like politics, business often bogs down in posturing and fails to…
One of the kingpins in Juniper’s financial future, according to the Street at least, is the success of its PTX strategy. PTX is an optical-core evolution that responds to network operator pressure for some way to build IP cores other than with humungous gigarouters. We noted at the time that we believed that the PTX…
The flap over usage pricing, renewed last week by announcements by AT&T and TW, has raised again the question of how network infrastructure might respond to a new broadband world, one where unlimited usage no longer stimulates new apps. In such a future, operators would be accepting a role of bit-pusher, and the growth of…
AT&T surprised nobody and angered everybody (or at least almost everybody) when they announced that they were now imposing metered usage on all unlimited-data plans at specific cap rates per month. The announcement comes just as the MWC show ends, a show that seemed more interested in promoting new things to do with cheap bandwidth…
Well, MWC is all but over at this point and I have to say that while I’d love to have sunned a bit in Barcelona I’m not sorry I didn’t attend. Judging from the comments I’ve received from operators and financial analysts at the show, it didn’t move the ball very much. If there was…
Cisco followed up on Chambers’ vague comments about small-cell support with an announcement of its own Hotspot 2.0 WiFi roaming products, particularly a gateway designed to manage small-cell connection into a mobile network. The move comes as network equipment vendors work hard to address the changes in networking being driven by the increased emphasis on…
The second day of MWC is demonstrating a show that’s seemingly polarizing between appliances and tiny cells. Obviously the trends are linked, and obviously the industry’s long-term health and direction may depend on how—and how well—the marketplace manages to link them. We’re seeing an explosion in tablet sizes as vendors try to figure out what…